Mask Cabinet Openings
Sealing cabinet interiors with sticky-side-out tape and masking film before painting the frames.
Spray Edge Banding on the Bench Instead of Masking Every Cabinet
When only the cabinet-box edges need color, skip masking the whole kitchen: staple self-adhesive edge banding to a board, sand and spray it to match, then roll it up and stick it onto the edges.
paint cabinet frames without taping everything off, cabinet carcass edges, respray kitchen units
The Problem
When a kitchen gets a spray finish, the visible front edges of the cabinet boxes need the new color too — and getting spray onto those thin edges normally means masking off the entire run of cabinets, inside and out. On a kitchen where the edges are most of what shows, you spend more time bagging up than spraying.
The Technique
A decorator who's used this for years flips the job: bring the edges to the spray gun instead.
- Staple lengths of self-adhesive edge banding down to a long board — a 2.4 m board holds enough to go around one unit.
- Sand the banding with 320 grit so the finish has something to bite.
- Spray the strips on the board, in your kitchen color, with the same finish as the doors.
- Once dry, peel and roll up each strip, then stick it along the cabinet edge — the banding is self-adhesive.
- Trim the ends clean with a utility knife.
No masking, no overspray risk inside the boxes, and the edges match the sprayed doors because they went through the same gun.
Pro tip: This is a tradeoff, not a free lunch: you're covering the edge rather than coating it, and other spray pros in the comments prefer conventional masking for that reason. Where it shines is units that are all edges and no side panels — the exact case where masking time explodes.
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